Another morning of rain and dark green light, but the garden is singing: beans and corn are up, strawberries are in flower, peas are stretching their tendrils, the first lemon-scented iris has opened.

I am thinking about the way in which setting becomes a character, not only here in my own Harmony life but also in fiction: Richard Ford's central New Jersey in The Sportswriter, Ford Madox Ford's cold and ominous Greenwich Palace in The Fifth Queen. (Truly it was only by accident that I cited two men named Ford.)

I am also thinking about Beowulf, in which half a population--the women--are invisible but the sea is as alive as the men are:

Shoulder to shoulder, we struggled on
for five nights, until the long flow
and pitch of the waves, the perishing cold,
night falling and winds from the north
drove us apart. The deep boiled up
and its wallowing sent the sea-brutes wild.

I must learn how to write a letter to this poet.